2026-11-03
In October, we shared information about another of our basic services: DMP4NFDI. In the summary below you will see what the team has been working on, what is usable already, and where you can find further resources and materials.
DMP4NFDI explained
The basic service DMP4NFDI is a centralised support service for NFDI. It helps the consortia create, manage, and standardise Data Management Plans (DMPs) and, increasingly, Software Management Plans (SMPs).
Data Management Plans are important because they make scientific research more reliable, transparent, secure, efficient, and reusable. Research funders, universities, journals, and legal frameworks may require researchers to explain how they will manage their data. A DMP helps demonstrate that the project has considered these responsibilities from the beginning. However, anyone who has ever had to fill in a DMP will know that the sheer number of fields can quickly become overwhelming or even confusing. This is where the work of the DMP4NFDI support service comes in.
What does DMP4NFDI provide?
- RDMO hosting: DMP4NFDI hosts the open-source Research Data Management Organiser (RDMO) as a multi-tenant service, so each consortium can have a customised client while sharing templates and modules across NFDI.
- Template development: It works with consortia to build discipline-specific, standardised, interoperable DMP/SMP templates that streamline research data workflows.
- Training and outreach: The service trains consortium staff to support their communities in using RDMO effectively.
- Integration support: It helps connect RDMO with other research-data tools and services, such as repositories, registries, and helpdesks.
Why does it matter?
The service aims to make DMPs more useful as practical tools for planning research, sharing data, and coordinating stakeholders. By promoting standardisation, machine-readability, and interoperability, it supports a more unified research-data ecosystem across disciplines.
Where’s the service at?
Let’s take a look at the service’s development status:
- Integration phase (July 2025–present): It is onboarding additional consortia through short incubator projects and expanding its template framework to cover SMPs, while aligning with international standards. Additionally, the service will increase its consultancy-style support to create more discipline-specific DMP/SMP templates and to boost outreach measures.
- Initialisation phase (May 2024–June 2025, completed): DMP4NFDI set up multi-tenant RDMO instances, released the first NFDI DMP Template Framework, developed plugins connecting RDMO to services such as sensor databases, Zenodo, and knowledge graphs, and created a train-the-trainer concept.
Of course we also have some video material you can watch to familiarise yourself with DMP4NFDI more.
- DMP4NFDI explained in 10 minutes: Learn all about the basic service in this video (Base4NFDI Demo Session, May 2025).
- NFDI Talk I, 7 April 2025: DMP4NFDI – machine-actionable Data and Software Management Planning in NFDI
- NFDI Talk II, 19 October 2026: DMP4NFDI – Software Management Plans: further support for sustainable research in NFDI
And if you’re interested in the topic ‘RDMO for Editors’ join the DMP4NFDI online-workshop on 28–29 October 2026.
Information and registration here.
Success stories: Incubators
Earlier, you got an overview of DMP4NDFI, including an introduction to the current usability status of the service as well as some links to video material the team has put together since its initialisation phase.
Now we want to take a closer look at the success stories of the team, especially their incubator projects. As you might already know, incubators in Base4NFDI mean a time-limited, jointly driven collaboration between a basic service and an interested partner. Partners are usually a research institution or another service within an NFDI consortium. Interested partners need to apply to join. Together, both sides (partner and basic service) define a concrete goal and work towards integrating the service into the partner's workflows. Depending on the service and the goal, this can range from consultation and guidance to hands-on technical implementation or co-development of new features. Due to this structured approach, incubators can speed up the development and integration of a service in the community and thus can lead to a measurable, successful result.
Therefore, incubator projects are an important aspect of the DMP4NFDI team. To ensure that basic services genuinely benefit all NFDI consortia, concrete use cases are essential, translating theory into practice. We will introduce you to a few numbers summarising the success stories each of the incubator projects contributes to: So far, the team has worked on 33 incubators together with 17 NFDI consortia. As of today, there were three cycles, with another one opening on 26 October 2026 (you can find the announcement of the current cycle and an invitation to apply here).
The incubator dashboard shows that the team categorises their incubator projects as follows:
- RDMO Hosting (15 projects)
- RDMO Integration (9 projects)
- Template Development (13 projects)
- Training & Outreach (5 projects)
We can see that RDMO Hosting and Support with template development are the most prominent services for the involved NFDI consortia, while RDMO Integration and Training & Outreach are not yet broadly adapted. This might, however, change in the future, as more and more consortia specific RDMO templates will be hosted and, consequently, integrated.
Let’s take a closer look at the RDMO Hosting and RDMO Integration. DMP4NFDI offers NFDI consortia a hosted, multi-tenant deployment of RDMO—an open-source tool for creating and managing Data Management Plans (DMPs). Each consortium receives a customised tenant while retaining the ability to share and reuse DMP templates and modules across the NFDI community. The multi-tenant architecture allows consortia to operate branded, community-specific RDMO instances without maintaining separate infrastructure. At the same time, shared templates and modules support interoperability and reduce duplication of DMP development across consortia.
For each tenant, DMP4NFDI can configure:
- A consortium-specific URL, such as https://rdmo.yourconsortium.de
- Visual theme and layout
- Authentication, including community AAI integration
- The set of available DMP templates
- User roles and permissions for editors and managers
- Plugins and integrations with other consortium services
Consortia can apply for such RDMO hosting via the DMP4NFDI Incubator Projects programme. RDMO supports multiple DMP templates, exposes project data through an API, and uses a plugin architecture for integration with project-management tools, databases, web services, and knowledge-graph exports. It is also aligned with the Research Data Alliance’s machine-actionable DMP standard, making it suitable for scalable, interoperable research data management across NFDI.
Furthermore, the team created a Service Cooperation Model that provides clear guidance on the support provided by the basic service and the responsibilities of the consortia. Customisation may require additional personnel, depending on the consortium’s requirements. DMP4NFDI particularly recommends providing a discipline- or community-specific DMP template and integrating RDMO with existing services in the consortium’s portfolio. You can find a list of both productive as well as test clients on the team’s website.
Another aspect the DMP4NFDI team offers via their incubator programme is Template Development. As the team states on their website, “[d]eveloping or adapting a template requires the assistance of personnel with the necessary scientific background and knowledge of your consortium. We strongly recommend running a community-specific RDMO client and integrating RDMO by connecting it to other services relevant to your consortium, as well as planning outreach activities.” Coming back to the aforedescribed process of RDMO Hosting and Integration, we can assume that with more incubator cycles, more consortia will also use the opportunity to develop their own RDMO template, making it interoperable with the overall NFDI DMP Template. If you want to learn more about the NFDI DMP Template, we recommend the team’s paper explaining the framework and how it serves the NFDI consortia. You can access it via Zenodo.
And lastly, we would like to point you attention to the team’s expertise in Training & Outreach Support. Consortia can apply for an incubator to get help through the modular Train-the-Trainer concept, offering training formats that take the needs of consortia into account and, hence, fostering the creation and use of DMPs and SMPs. As the title of the concept suggests, it is built to be adaptable to specific communities and their interests, putting the users at its centre. The team applies this strategy also to the outreach support they offer, specifically through needs assessment and tailored community engagement.
We invite you to visit the service team’s website as it is full of useful information and it also contains links to helpful material the team has produced since they started in June 2024. It is a very active team caring for its user groups and also promoting the importance of DMPs and SMPs for researchers and project groups.
If you want to get in touch with the team, you can use the contact form on their website or directly via
